Life of the geek.

Ok, I don’t come under the strict definition of a geek, but I’m sure I’m close enough. Read…

I’ve just come back from two weeks helping out at a science school at the University of Sydney. I was on the production crew whose primary responsibility was to record lectures given to students for public broadcast on the web. It was extremely busy, but very exciting. I volunteered to help out making a flash video player that would play the lecture videos with the lecture slides displaying at the right times. Turned out to be a much bigger task than expected. Finding the right ActionScript functions took some time, and making sure everything was happening at the right time took some effort as well.

I am now co-webmaster of the Young Scientists of Australia. The thing is I don’t really know what the idea is behind the PHP code that is behind the site. In fact alot of it seems redundant and I don’t understand why the HTML wasn’t just put there. Why do some people feel because they know how to do something they have to use it? It would still give the sample output but require much less work on the side of the server and help to manage the design of the page better.

I had a subject clash and didn’t get a timetable at first, so I changed out of ‘From Plato to Einstein’, to ‘Darwinism’. I would have like to have read more on the theories beforehand, but that couldn’t be helped.

I’ve also recently discovered RSS feeds. I’ve found them rather handy to know when blogs I read, including this one have been updated. I have them in my browser and it comes up with a number beside them corresponding to how many new articles have come out. The RSS for this website is feed://transition-blogs.unimelb.edu.au/seconds/?feed=rss2

I also went to the free Swing dance lesson with the Dancesport club, one of the Melbourne Uni sport clubs. Had heaps of fun and am going back again this Thursday 1pm. (This one is also free, but $50 + $10 Membership for the rest of the semester.)